


how to love a girl properly

by inattention



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fashion & Models, Coming Out, F/F, Falling In Love, Getting Together, Girls Kissing, Implied Sexual Content, Internalized Homophobia, Light Angst, Sexuality Crisis, lots of yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:35:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25926745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inattention/pseuds/inattention
Summary: She’d truly meant to keep her hands firmly on her flute. She’d truly meant to keep quiet, to keep safe, to keep herself well away from the girl who makes her heart feel like hummingbird wings.I think we all know that’s not what happens.
Relationships: Haiba Alisa/Kageyama Miwa
Comments: 47
Kudos: 183
Collections: Femslash Fics That Make My Brain Mush





	how to love a girl properly

**Author's Note:**

> here's a challenge: for just how much of this fic can i project

When they meet again, it is during Alisa’s debut as a deity to a gathering of godlings—they don’t know her name. It’s not time for them to, yet.

But Kageyama Miwa already knows, and very soon, they will, too. _Alisa Haiba_ , the name will be the only thing they see when they close their eyes.

Right now though, they look at her like they can see right through her and Alisa is content to leave it like that. After all, the only thing she really shares with them is the desire to leave a mark so big people don’t have any choice but to remember her.

Kageyama Miwa has seen so many people walk through these doors with her ancient, all seeing eyes. If Alisa is a goddess awaiting her coronation, Miwa is the stone gargoyle standing outside the venerated chapel, guarding the steps and standing in wait for the worthy.

She’s been here for as long as she can remember, a hairstylist to the more high-profile names. She is familiar with the sentiment that beauty is a weapon as sharp as wit and as destructive as brawn—has long developed an immunity to pretty faces. Still, no one catches her attention the way Haiba Alisa can without even trying.

She sweeps into the room in her flowy light blue dress, the skirt billowing around her modestly and prettily, the diamonds in her ears and around her neck winking at her from beneath the chandeliers.

Just looking at her gives Miwa the same adrenaline she gets when she’s lighting a cigarette. The realization coils in her gut—a strange, warm thing that she tries her best to suppress. She fails, but at least she can say she tried.

 _Haiba Alisa is a rising star,_ they whisper in candy coated hues. _She’s the nation’s darling._

They recite their poetry behind closed doors, find their religion in the geometry of her body, define beauty with every fidget and quirk of her features. Miwa can’t say she blames them.

Isn’t she just a _spectacular_ thing, even if she’s standing awkwardly by the refreshments table? A soft laugh of amusement escapes Miwa’s frost lined lips, melting the ice that has long gathered there on the seams, and she ends up raising her free hand to invite her over. The surprise in Alisa’s eyes is incandescent against the sparkle of the lights.

Japan’s Aphrodite Rises From Sea Foam, the spreads say. They call her a rising star. They call her a deity in mortal skin. They call her a great deal of things. Everyone’s paying attention.

They should be. Haiba Alisa does not deserve anything less.

Miwa hates that she is, though—how at the foot of this girl’s altar, she is just like everyone else, just another worshipper taken in by the mold of her hands and the silvery vivaciousness of her platinum eyelashes brushing against her winter kissed cheeks.

“It’s so good you saw me, Kageyama-san.” Alisa exclaims, relief palpable. Her shoulders loosen. “It was so awkward standing there alone! It felt vaguely like high school.”

“Oh, I doubt that.” Miwa chuckles, breathy and slight. It’s her best kind of laugh—the one that made past lovers shiver and tingle to the tips of their toes, the one she saves for special occasions.

Alisa looks embarrassed, twirling a strand of light hair around her finger, and Miwa knows that she’s right. That’s just the law with pretty girls: they were never left alone, for better or for worse.

“Kageyama-san, _please_.”

“You don’t have to be so formal,” she pats the empty space on the red velvet beside her. “Take a seat.”

“ _Oh_.” Alisa blinks. Then she smiles—the kind of megawatt smile pretty girls always have on tap. The kind that makes you want to bend to every passing fancy they have. “Right! Sorry, thank you.”

Miwa quirks a corner of her lips—a mischievous little grin that boys in high school and men in smoke wrenched suits by the bar told her make her look like the best kind of sin. She doesn’t want to admit it, would rather die than let it past her lips, but she wants Alisa to think she is just that—wants Alisa to wonder if she was a temptation worth tasting.

“What an honor it is to play escort to the beauty of the ball.”

Alisa’s cheeks flush of embarrassment and she squeaks, covering her face. “Oh, no, nothing of the sort…”

“But you are,” and she is. Alisa peeks up at her, hesitant, cheeks still blooming carmine. “I think you are.”

“Kageyama-san, you flatter me. You do.”

“Just call me Miwa,” she says, bringing the champagne flute back to her lips. It tastes like honey and poison and all the verses of how she reveres the cut of cloth against her skin, the way her collarbones peek out of her collar, the way strands of her hair frame her face nicely. Then, belatedly, “Please.”

Alisa giggles. “Miwa-san, then.”

She’d truly meant to keep her hands firmly on her flute. She’d truly meant to keep quiet, to keep safe, to keep herself well away from the girl who makes her heart feel like hummingbird wings.

I think we all know that’s not what happens.

  
Miwa first meets her a lifetime ago—remembers her sugar and spice perfume in glimpses the way she remembers flashes of the crowded gym: the audience screaming out their concordant hymns, the court covered by black and orange and red, her little brother tossing a ball into the air, the echoing of a sport that she once loved with all her heart, too.

Little Tobio has never learned how to fall out of love with volleyball, but he’d told her about the upcoming battle of the trash heap with his eyes burning with adoration renewed and that had shocked her enough to laugh.

She knows that she’d found it funny, that Tobio had huffed and pouted like a child, because even when he was always ridiculously stoic, he was still her little brother. It’s been a while since she last saw that sudden show of passion—that’s really how she found herself standing in the bleachers late in the game, watching him play for the first time since his last middle school game.

 _You can stop coming to them now,_ he’d told her in the car, coming home from that game, and she had obeyed—well, until she found out that Tobio had been set alight again. It was too good of a chance to waste.

Miwa had gotten lost on the way to find Tobio after the game and Alisa had taken her under her wing. After all, it was difficult not to see the resemblance.

Besides, Miwa was reminiscent of the miracle (monster) on court and older sisters with legends for legacies knew more than anyone else what it felt like to watch someone grow so swiftly that it sometimes feels like violence.

 _You came for your little brother, too?_ She’d asked, holding out her hand for her to shake. _The setter, right? That’s who your brother is?_

_Yes, that’s him._

_Oh, wow, you must be so proud! He’s very cool!_

She remembers taking her hand the same way she’d taken the fragmented pieces of her smile and etched it on the soft flesh of her capillaries.

 _Yes_ , she tells her, grin sharp and brazen. Alisa looks more amused than offended. _Isn’t my Tobio amazing?_

  
Miwa knows how to be professional. That isn’t the problem here.

Alisa is starting to feel like an ever present phantom, an overwhelming presence even when she isn’t physically there. Everyone feels the need to talk about her now. That’s fine. She can handle her at a distance.

What she can’t handle is proximity. She knows it would’ve happened eventually—Alisa getting so good she reaches her—but it still makes her heart hum.

Like every girl, Haiba Alisa is deadly. There’s something about years of being pit against each other, of forcing themselves to stay in the sweet spot between the labels of prude and slut, of learning how to deal with impossible beauty standards that makes a girl stronger—makes it so that they’re built differently.

She takes her hands in hers, excited. The warmth of her skin on hers makes her shiver—thinks that it makes sense why so many fall under her spell. She’s not a bad looking girl, and just the right amount of sweet and smart that pulls people in, and when she smiles at her, she feels weightless enough to float.

“Miwa-san, I look forward to working with you. Please take care of me.”

(How they both end up sweaty and naked in the backseat of a car is something they’ll never truly have the answer to, they think.)

The thing is: Kageyama Miwa knows yearning. She is a girl who likes girls—of course she knows yearning. She wishes it wasn’t such a close acquaintance, such an intimate friend, but alas, this is just how things are.

Miwa knows it like this—the touch of your best friend in the summer months when you’re both sweaty and electric; it is the overwhelming jealousy of how a man could be everything beside her and how she could only be a friend; it is how in the dim lights of a house party, she takes you by the hand, drunk and giggling, and says, “we should kiss,” and you know it’s for the laughs, it’s for fun, and you know her boyfriend is probably egging her on, and you know that there is no happy ending to this, but still, you grin your cool girl smile and tell her that’s _it’s fine,_ even when your heart is pounding in your chest and you know it isn’t. It isn’t fine.

Because you like this girl—you like her truly, and that is hard enough on its own without the settling foreboding feeling in your chest that tells you _there is no other way to be happy for someone like you_.

So when she wakes up on leather and next to Alisa, she sits up and convinces herself to breathe because she can handle this, she can. She knows longing well. She knows it as well as she knows the pages of every magazine Alisa has ever been in—pretty girl swathed in pretty clothes and bathed in pretty lights. 

_Rinse, repeat_ , she thinks, when the girl stirs and looks up at her with those big, adoring eyes—her lips quirk into a smile, gentle and sweet and true. _Rinse, repeat._

What she doesn’t count on: pretty girl blinks up at her and blurts out, “Hey, Miwa-san, can I please have your number?”

She blinks and sees every fear she’s ever had amplified in the kaleidoscope of her eyes.

She finds it in herself to smile wryly as she pulls her shirt back on.

“No.”

  
The next time it happens, it is on the set of Alisa’s first big spread. Miwa doesn’t remember the name of it now, even when asked. She’d been too focused keeping her eyes on beauty incarnate and feeling her desire unfurl like a flower inside her.

This girl walks like she knows she’s sex on legs, and the way she moves is calculated. All girls are, to an extent, but Haiba Alisa is a woman on a mission, and she knows from experience that very rarely do they fail.

She ends up making out with her in the bathroom stall, strawberry gloss staining the corners of their mouths, jaws peppered with candy cane marks. When Alisa pulls away, eyes blown wide and cheeks flushed, bra undone under her shirt courtesy of Miwa's expert fingers, she asks, “What do you want from me, Miwa-san?”

She doesn’t know. Growing up, she’s learned how to keep everything pushed down, kept locked, and this is not any different.

She swallows down the _everything_ her heart was urging her to choke out and kisses her again to make sure her lips were sealed tight. Alisa lets her—she clutches into her shirt, _desperate, desperate, desperate_.

Miwa thinks she understands, but she doesn’t say.

It is not something she should say.

There’s a post it note in her purse when she checks it later that night, her lips still tingling. There’s Alisa’s number written in her delicate handwriting. Miwa stares at it for a couple of minutes, traces the curls of her lines with her finger.

She throws it out a moment later, trying her best not to remember the pretty girl who’d looked like she’d wanted Miwa to ask her for her everything.

She should really stop reading romance novels.

“Good morning,” Alisa greets her, already on her chair and scrolling through Twitter when Miwa comes in the dressing room.

“Good morning,” she replies, because if they act well enough, then this probably makes the lines they’ve crossed indecipherable. “Have you already put on your sunscreen?”

Alisa hums, considering, as she takes out her lipsticks and her palettes and her brushes. “No, not yet,” she replies, blithe, “Won’t you put it on for me, Miwa-san?”

She turns to her, sharp, but Alisa is either oblivious or acting dumb for the sake of making things more difficult for her. Miwa knows it’s the latter. Alisa isn’t nearly as guileless as they think.

“I guess,” she grits out, squirting a liberal amount into her palms. Alisa looks pleased with herself. “You shouldn’t really leave your house without this, though.”

Alisa raises a neatly plucked eyebrow at her, pale lips quirking up in challenge as Miwa leans in to press fingers to skin and then she lets out a sweet sound of mirth.

“Miwa-san, it’s cute when you worry for me.”

She pauses, hands stilling on Alisa’s skin.

“It’s my job,” she tells her, bland, as her fingers resume their rubbing motions. “Stay still, Alisa.”

“Whatever you say,” she says. Then softer, fonder, a secret that’s meant for her and her only, “Whatever you want.”

Miwa and Tobio sometimes go out to cafés to catch up, though it’s usually just them doing work as they drink coffee. Today is no exception—except Tobio makes a face when he sees her and averts his eyes.

“ _Onee-san_ ,” he mumbles, pointing to his neck. She’s confused for a moment before she looks down and she pulls up her turtleneck a little higher.

“Sorry about that.”

“It’s alright.” The smell of coffee is strong. Tobio slurps down his milkshake. “You’re seeing Haiba’s sister, am I right?”

“How’d you know?”

“Hinata knows everything and he talks a lot, so.”

Miwa hums, resting her elbow on the table and cupping her cheek as she takes a sip from her scorching hot cup of black coffee. “You’re still pining over him, huh?”

Tobio makes an affronted noise, blowing air out of his nose. “ _Onee-san_. Please. Fix your own problems first.”

“It’s really not that big of a thing.”

Tobio raises an eyebrow at her, but doesn’t say more, instead choosing to grin knowingly into the rim of his mug. Miwa feels perceived, somehow.

She doesn’t like it.

When Tobio was in high school, Miwa was the first person he’d ever told about liking boys.

She was lashing out before she even realized she was, painted red and green and ugly. “Why would you?”

Tobio had looked hurt and he’d flinched away from her, and she had panicked and taken his large hand in hers, muttering out frenzied apologies. The hand of a boy. The hand of a man. The hand of someone whose supposed to hold girls the way Miwa could not.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “Tobio, please. I don’t mean that.”

Tobio’s voice is small when he answers, but he doesn’t pull away from her, which is enough. “What did you mean, then?”

She doesn’t know how to say she’s jealous. That if she were a man, she would’ve been able to like a girl the way she does, and it wouldn’t be—

“Oh, Tobio, oh, my dear brother. I’m so sorry. You’re okay. You’re perfectly okay. Love who you want.”

Kageyama Miwa is a coward. She’s always known this. But Tobio isn’t and that is good enough. She pulls him into a hug and he melts into it, burying his face into her chest like he used to do when they were children and he scraped his knee trying to do another volleyball related stunt in the backyard.

Alisa isn’t a coward, either. She corners her after today’s set, still wearing today’s makeup, fists clenched as she steps forward, trapping Miwa against the wall.

“Do you like me?” It’s torment. She hears high school and then she remembers that it’s not high school. This is not high school and she’s loved enough boys to know she can’t love them and no amount of resistance can make it so. This is not high school and Miwa’s never loved a girl properly before but she’s always wanted to but—

“What?”

“Do you like me?” she repeats. She purses her lips. “Because I do. I like you so intensely it feels all-consuming. Do you feel the same?”

Miwa makes a face, taking a step backwards in surprise. “Surely it’s not as easy as that.”

Alisa’s brows narrow and she takes one step forward, almost adamant that there shouldn’t be any space between them.

“It wasn’t easy at all,” she protests, voice indignant. “You kept making me chase after you. My heels aren’t meant for running, y’know.”

Miwa’s mouth opens in shock when she realizes _oh, this girl likes me. This girl likes me and she can learn how to love me, she can learn how to do it properly and then, and then, there will be other ways to be happy._

“Have you caught up to me?”

“You tell me, darling,” Alisa tells her, taking both of her hands in hers and holding tight, devotion a new shade that she colors into Miwa’s skin, “you tell me.”

(She has. Miwa leans forward and asks if she can kiss her.)

(Alisa, of course, says yes, her chuckle honey sweet, “you’re really too cool, Miwa-san,” before it gets drowned out by her lips on hers.)


End file.
